gt94sss2
Member of DD Central
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Post by gt94sss2 on Dec 10, 2015 16:13:00 GMT
I am not a lawyer but my recollection of the law is that by attempting to moderate posts, the moderators actually make themselves legally liable for their content.
If they did not moderate posts and simply had a rule stating that the authors are responsible for the content than any potential legal breaches are those of the author and that is who any borrower/platform would need to go after if someone broke a platforms T&C etc.
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james
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Post by james on Jan 2, 2016 6:35:31 GMT
I am not a lawyer but my recollection of the law is that by attempting to moderate posts, the moderators actually make themselves legally liable for their content. Your recollection is not accurate any longer in the UK though there was a time when it would have been. There was a time in the United States when Cubby v CompuServe (1991) was overturned by Stratton Oakmont v Prodigy (1995) that merely moderating at all could be considered to lead to liability. This was resolved by Congress in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (1996) that made it explicit that sites were not liable. The precedents involved there have since commonly been adopted in countries with similar legal systems, recognising the practical reality of what moderation does and does not do and could or could not reasonably do. This does not mean that it is always so in all legal systems. You might consider say the censorship laws in China as an example, some of which require active moderation and censoring or removal of posts that contain references to a wide range of things. This has been extended at times to things like phone texting censorship based on text content. It has also extended overseas with some US providers disclosing details of customers to Chinese authorities for writing things that are unambiguously legal in the US, resulting in criminal conviction in China. The capability to do at least electronic scanning of all text and message board content in a country is not today unduly hard technically to accomplish unless it is well encrypted. Indeed, it is likely that a very high proportion of all unencrypted and much encrypted internet traffic in the United States is so scanned as it transit peering points where networks connect to each other or to their endpoints. The same would apply to effectively all international traffic via the UK.
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